Femininity Is Natural
My latest at The Occidental Quarterly is up. It’s a review of the book Taking Sex Differences Seriously by Steven Rhoads. That women are different than men shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. What’s remarkable is how deep the desire for children is in women. Also, the folk wisdom that feminists end up miserable has empirical support.
John Adams once famously wrote to his wife that he studied politics and war so his children could study mathematics and philosophy and his grandchildren poetry and music. Only a man of the Enlightenment could be so naive. More than two hundred years later some students do study mathematics and music. But it would’ve probably never crossed Adams’ mind in a thousand years that yet others would be studying “gender.”…
When asked to rate how important on a 10 point scale different parts of their lives are to their happiness, 86 percent of mothers say that their children are a 10 while only 30 percent of working women give their careers a rating that high. Many women who buy into the worldview of the nihilists end up regretting it. Sylvia Hewlett set out to write a book on women who had achieved great things. After interviewing the first ten, she was struck by the fact that each one was childless. Not a single woman was so by choice. Hewlett then went out and commissioned a survey of women who were making more than $60,000 a year in midcareer. When they graduated from college, 14 percent knew they didn’t want children but 33 percent ended up childless. Hewlett wrote that she was “continually surprised — and humbled — by how raw and near to the surface the emotions” were. A women said to Hewlett that is was “frightening, this yearning for a child — it’s hard to fathom the desperate urgency.”…
Not even ideological feminists are immune. A childless newswoman from Australia said that she was “Angry that I was so foolish to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel. Angry that I was daft enough to believe female fulfillment came with a leather briefcase.” A female journalist with a Yale degree said that when she realized that she wanted to mother her baby, “a huge and terrifying abyss” opened up beneath her.
A primate female is built for birthing and raising children. Her psychological makeup and hormonal balance evolved for it. Some skills are remarkably specialized. When a baby cries in pain, mothers and fathers react the same way. But when the cry is “I want” (food, comfort) the female is quicker to respond. When childless women watch a video of a baby crying their heart rates accelerate. Those of childless men decelerate.
As much as women need children, children need their mothers. Infants prefer their moms to their dads….
While in the womb, a baby can recognize a mother’s heartbeat and voice. After birth, he is calmed by both. In one experiment researchers took monkey babies away from their mothers and noted the “grief, listlessness, the obvious and heart-rendering despair.” One person involved declared, “Thank God, we only have to do it once to prove the point.” If only our culture showed such consideration for human children.
10 Comments
Aug 28, 2009 4:05 pm |
28Aug09
Speaking of sexual dimorphism, women seem to have a larger corpus callosum than men. It has been suggested that this structure may support instinctive activity which may explain some of the female/male differences in reaction to child demands. I wonder too, if it may have an effect on interpretation during female/male verbal conversation. I wonder often.
Aug 28, 2009 4:30 pm |
Interesting, but stop dating your posts!
It’s done automatically.
Aug 28, 2009 6:07 pm |
I’m curious if there is a correlation with feminism in women and female body type/androgen level.
Aug 29, 2009 2:51 pm |
This reminds me of Queen Victoria who was more a product of her secluded upbringing than the times in which she lived. She was groomed as the heir, very unlike most women of the time. Yet her uncle Leopold helped choose her husband, who managed to essentially supplant her as sovereign. Albert and Victoria were very close in age. I think she was 20 and he was 19 when they married. I read a very interesting book about him about 10 years ago, Ein deutscher Prinz in England, by Hans-Joachim Netzer. Not available in English, although similar offerings are. Basically his role as consort grew as her interests in her children grew. I don’t think this example is so odd. Most men marrying a queen have a reasonable expectation of becoming a de facto king. Vice versa, not so much. So even when handed the position and the career, as many college educated women are, they still lean toward more natural interests.
Aug 30, 2009 12:38 pm |
It’s sad. So many intelligent women (most of them white) becoming dead-ends.
One wonders how many aging feminists are now miserable and lonely – and how many of them want younger women to end up as miserable as they are. They must feel this way or surely they would be more vocal about the need for younger women to have babies while they still can.
Aug 30, 2009 6:06 pm |
“One wonders how many aging feminists are now miserable and lonely”
Most of them, I would imagine. I’m reading more and more reports of women recanting feminism in their 40s.
“and how many of them want younger women to end up as miserable as they are.”
The majority, again. Misery loves company. Especially miserable women. I would imagine that many of the most rabid feminists are also among the most miserable – hence the need to rationalize and evangelize. It really is a suicide cult.
Sep 2, 2009 5:28 am |
Half Sigma hit an out-of-the-park home run with this observation of his -
[...] What Roissy calls “beta behavior” evolved because it’s the most successful reproductive strategy in a civilized society. When pre-marital and extra-marital sex was very strongly discouraged by society, being able to talk a girl into bed didn’t mean spreading your genes as much as it meant being forced to marry her at the end of a shotgun (or crossbow or sword or whatever weapon was used back then), or even worse, killed by her angry relatives, put in jail for the crime of adultery, etc.
Modern society is now reverting to a more primitive form, and the beta behavior bred into humanity over many thousands of years will much more quickly be bred out. Lucofkily, this isn’t happening in Japan. The Japanese may have a low birthrate, but only 2% births are to unmarried mothers (see here). Japan will be the last bastion of civilization. [...]
BRAVO HS, MUCHO BRAVO FOR TELLING THE TRUTH ON WHAT IS A MAJOR REASON FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION!!!
Sep 2, 2009 5:28 am |
Link for above quote -
http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/09/hbd-and-game.html
Sep 2, 2009 10:36 am |
I think we need to consider the cyclical nature of these population trends. Single motherhood was discouraged by culture for a long time. That means folks not naturally disposed to monogamy could be nearly as biologically successful as the naturally monogamous. However, without external pressure, they follow their instincts and mother nature gets a crack at them. These trends take a while to manifest themselves.
Women with fewer partners have more babies.
http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2009/08/for-women-too-fewer-partners-means-more.html
So, uh, if the sluts can’t out breed the chaste, uh, how are the sluts going to “shape” the future.
Oh, and monogamous men also have the most kids.
http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2008/10/fewer-sexual-partners-means-more-babies.html
Bed hopping≠baby making.
The single mother trend will level off then decline.
Low breeding feminists will decline.
Biologically unsuccessful strategies are self limiting.
Sep 2, 2009 3:36 pm |
This is why abortion is good. I’d say the majority of abortions is from PUA (pick-up artist, “alpha”) males and sluts.
Leave a Reply